“Lynn.” She smiled warmly. “And you must be Danny. Welcome to the Conservatory.”
She offered her left hand to Danny, too. He paused and took a second to realize he’d automatically held up his right. I realized with a start that by raising him in Mundane circles, I’d failed to school him in proper Adept etiquette. Luckily, he recovered quickly and gave her a confident Leftie handshake.
“I’m excited to be here, ma’am.”
I blinked at my brother’s first use of the word ma’am ever.
“You’ll have to forgive our dust,” she said. “Most of the major interior construction is complete, but we’ve got a lot of work left to get ready for our launch in August.”
“This sure doesn’t look like any high school I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“That’s because we’re not going to be like any other high school.” Her smile was friendly, but I had the feeling this speech was rehearsed. “The Conservatory for the Arcane Arts will be the first charter high school in the nation focused on incorporating magic into the curriculum.”
“So, all of the students will be Adepts?” Danny asked.
She shook her head. “Since we’re a public school, we’re legally required to accept any student who wishes to attend, if there is room. If we have more applicants than space, we use a lottery system.” She waved us toward a set of elevators and pushed the button.
“How can a Mundane student thrive in a school where the curriculum is for Adepts?” I asked as we entered the car.
“First, we don’t use the term Mundane here. We call those students traditional learners.” She pushed the button for the second floor. “Second, the core classes are just like in other schools. What separates us is the types of electives we offer. For example, our Adept learners might take a spagyrics class, but our traditional learners might opt for a class in herbalism. All students also take the history of magic classes. The fact is that there are careers for TLs in the magic industry, so there’s much for them to learn and use for the future.”
“Where did most of your students attend middle school?” I asked
“A quarter of the incoming first years attended the Sir Isaac Newton Academy school. I used to be the principal there.”
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“It’s a private school that serves K through eight. It’s located in Highland Hills.”
That explained why I hadn’t heard of it. Highland Hills was where Adepts who worked for Big Magic lived. No one from the Cauldron could afford to send their kids there for a proper education in clean magic.
“Why would those families come all the way into the Cauldron?” I asked.
“Because of me.” She delivered this information as if I should have already known the answer.
“How many students do you have who haven’t gone to Newton?” Danny asked. He sounded worried, and I couldn’t blame him. After the shit show of privilege we’d dealt with at Meadowlake, we were both wary about him mixing with a bunch of snobs again.
“The first-year class is made up of a mix of students from all the middle schools in Babylon. However, for the upper classes, we got special permission to be more deliberate about who we admitted.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We recruited students from local high schools who showed promise in the arcane arts. Most of them are Adepts, but there are several traditional learners who showed promise in witchcraft or practical magic.”
Danny and I exchanged a look. He’d been studying with Mez informally for the last couple of months, but he was still pretty new. I worried that he might struggle to catch up to the students who’d been trained for years.
The elevator dinged and we all exited. The floor was wide open, with glass-enclosed labs. “Thanks to our corporate sponsors, we offer our students state-of-the-art labs. We also have our own greenhouse, so students have access to the freshest herbs and plants for their experiments.”
“Wow,” Danny said. “Right, Katie?” He elbowed me in the ribs, as if reminding me to play it up to Hidalgo.
“Cool,” I said, lamely. It’s not that I wasn’t impressed. I was. It was just a wave of jealousy caught me off guard. The kids at this school would have no idea how lucky they were. There were still parts of the world where Adept kids might be beaten because their parents thought being a Leftie was a sign of a demon’s curse.
“You grew up in the Cauldron, didn’t you, Kate?” Hidalgo asked.
She showed us into a lobby outside a suite of offices, which I assumed belonged to the administration.
“I did,” I said. “Not far from here, actually.”
“Working for Abe Prospero?”
I paused, trying to decide whether I was imagining the judgment in her tone. “He’s my uncle. I’m sure our mutual friend mentioned that.”
“Yes, Mayor Volos hinted you were childhood friends. Not hard to put it all together with the last name.”
Danny groaned.
She turned to him with a warm smile. “Looks like you come by your powers naturally, young man.”
He sat up straighter. “You’re not worried that I’m a Prospero?”
She shook her head. “Should I be?”
“Danny wasn’t old enough to learn to cook dirty when we left,” I snapped. “His training has all been clean.”
“That was never in question,” she said. “Although it would have been fine if he had. Magic is magic. What makes it clean, dirty, good, or bad is mostly based on the intentions of the Adept.”
The fact her philosophy so closely resembled my own brought me up short. She was slowly chiseling away at the chip on my shoulder, but I wasn’t sure yet it that was a good thing or if she’d been briefed by Volos on how to handle me.
She opened the door to her office. I’d been expecting something bordering on corporate neutrality. Beige everything and a polite picture of her family on her desk.
Instead, the room had a huge window looking out on the river. But the excellent view competed with the loud décor inside. She’d painted the walls brilliant lime green. Along one wall, shelving held a display of arcane texts and magical implements and totems. Her desk was a large wooden slab varnished to a blond shine with a natural edge. And the pictures on display were mostly her in exotic locations with various shaman, priestesses, and other magic practitioners.
Lisa Hidalgo wasn’t just a school principal. She was a well-traveled and clearly well-educated magic instructor.
“Please sit.” She indicated two brightly painted wooden chairs and took her own seat. Instead of a proper desk chair, she had one of those yoga balls.
“So, as I understand it, Danny was somewhat…creative about his application process.”
I frowned at her, but to Danny I said, “Can you give us a second?”
He shot me a suspicious look. Considering the last time I’d said it, I’d been about to chew Pen a new one, I couldn’t blame him for being worried. Still, I wasn’t about to let him sit there while I had some real talk with the good doctor.
Hidalgo watched him go with a neutral expression, and once he was gone, she simply looked at me with her brows raised.
“Who told you that?” I said.
“Detective Prospero, may I be frank?”
“I’d prefer that.”
She opened her hands. “Mayor Volos is a donor, and he did advocate for Danny. But I’ll tell you what I told him—I’ll take his donations, but I’m no one’s bitch.”
A slow smile spread across my face. “Oh, I bet he liked that.”
“Let’s say that the call ended rather quickly after that.” She grinned. “Anyway, my point is that I assure you that I’m confident Danny is a good fit here. Kichiri’s recommendation holds a lot more weight for me than the mayor’s.”
It took me a second to remember that Kichiri was Mez’s real name. “That’s good to hear. Thank you for your candor.” I sat forward. “Everything I’ve read about and seen here today looks good.”
“But?”